Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • On Realism

    [W]hat is the relationship between:

      and the combination of:

        when given

          In purest terms, of course, there are limits because of necessary information loss from the process of categorization. And it certainly appears that we can use science (categories and measurements and narratives that express causal relations that are allegories to experience) to understand almost everything we desire to = eventually. But despite apparent successes, the question is whether those limits are meaningful in the context of being a human: converting extra sensual perceptions to sense perceptions. Those limits can be meaningful in at least three dimensions: a) the scope of the patterns that we can identify (which I suspect we can use machines for), b) the period of those patterns, given that causality depends on arbitrary selection of periods of regularity, c) the number of axis of causal relations that we can understand. But since our problem is knowledge for the purpose of action in real time, not ‘knowledge’ as a static absolute, and it is our actions that are limited by our ignorance, and we would not be ‘human’ without those limits, the question always seems irrational. If we understand that all thought is time-contingent based upon the knowledge at our disposal, then it’s simply illogical to even try to represent knowledge as static ‘truths’. The question itself is irrational. If the standard is ‘enough perception that we can act to achieve our ends despite the limits of our minds’ that is very different from ‘we can understand the full set of causal relations by a process of representing measures of categories, and reducing them to expressions that are possible to articulate as a narrative.’ Since, we can test our theories, and science demands that we can both test (reproduce)( and determine the boundary conditions (falsify) our theories, using science and language to extend our sense perceptions, then we can test the correspondence of our understanding of the real world. It certainly appears that we can be successful in reducing the unobservable complexity of the real world into symbolic and linguistic representations that are sufficient allegories to experience, that we can understand and at at any scale in which we an define a scheme of measurement (sensing). And there is no reason at present to believe that there is some limit to this, other than our ability to marshall the physical resources to perform tests, or because performing those tests would violate the terms of cooperation with other humans (morality). And so, as Steven says above, theories are descriptive within the state of knowledge of the moment, if they correctly express the measurements and narratives of causal relations as we understand them at the moment, because they cannot exist without the context of the forms of measurement that we used to formulate them. Those statements in fact, correspond with reality at some level of precision. So the realist expectation is that we increasingly understand the complexity of reality, but may never fully achieve it. Although that imperfection may be meaningless for the purposes of action, as long as the allegory to experience is sufficient to produce the actions in question. The generational problem affecting the discipline of philosophy is that the metaphysical assumption that we can introspectively solve these problems without the help of science is as absurd as thinking that we can solve these problems without language. The discipline of Philosophy can help us construct analogies to experience so that we may consume those analogies and ‘understand’ them. But we cannot introspectively sense, perceive, and understand much outside of human scale, without the discipline of science. Hence not only is CR a form of Realism, but it is an improvement on Realism because it does not assume that representations are static.

        • Putting Violence Back Into Polite Political Discourse – Once Sentence At A Time

          [P]rivate property is unnatural to man, even if it is necessary for mankind do produce a division of knowledge and labor. Private property was a technical innovation that allowed males to take control of reproduction that they had lost with the invention of gossip, cooperation and spears, and to do so without resorting to in-group violence, or violence against women. Private property was granted and gained in exchange for service in the creation and preservation of private property. Monogamy was a compromise. It was an unnatural compromise. Women, having obtained the vote, did not seek equal rights to property, but rents and privileges, and they are now able to use the state to extract rents from aggregate productivity regardless of gender – albeit mostly male productivity. And women are abandoning seeking rents from a single male’s productivity through marriage. It’s in women’s interest to violate private property, and regain reproductive and economic control through the state rather than through marriage or sex. Marriage doesn’t make sense for women unless they can capture an alpha, and even then its a question of benefits versus compromises. Marriage doesn’t make sense for men at all. The logical outcome for men is to free ride as much as possible, and avoid having any property at all. For those men that desire property, it cannot be obtained by majority decision. As such, it must be maintained by either exchange – buying off the rentiers – or by violence – preventing the rentiers. AND THAT IS WHAT THE DATA SAYS. Men and women are doing the logical thing. What else would we expect them to do? We may be irrational moral voters, but we are certainly rational moral consumers. The source of property is use of violence to create the institution of property against the will of the majority. Only then is property an asset worthy of seeking by the middle and lower classes who which also to be enfranchised in the prosperity that results from the formal and informal institutions of private property. (It’s thankless work, you know. …. Putting violence back into polite political discourse, one sentence at a time. 😉

        • PUTTING VIOLENCE BACK INTO POLITE POLITICAL DISCOURSE (One sentence at a time.)

          PUTTING VIOLENCE BACK INTO POLITE POLITICAL DISCOURSE

          (One sentence at a time.)

          Private property is unnatural to man, even if it is necessary for mankind do produce a division of knowledge and labor.

          Private property was a technical innovation that allowed males to take control of reproduction that they had lost with the invention of gossip, cooperation and spears, and to do so without resorting to in-group violence, or violence against women.

          Private property was granted and gained in exchange for service in the creation and preservation of private property.

          Monogamy was a compromise. It was an unnatural compromise.

          Women, having obtained the vote, did not seek equal rights to property, but rents and privileges, and they are now able to use the state to extract rents from aggregate productivity regardless of gender – albiet mostly male productivity.

          And women are abandoning seeking rents from a single male’s productivity through marriage.

          It’s in women’s interest to violate private property, and regain reproductive and economic control through the state rather than through marriage or sex.

          Marriage doesn’t make sense for women unless they can capture an alpha, and even then its a question of benefits versus compromises.

          Marriage doesn’t make sense for men at all.

          The logical outcome for men is to free ride as much as possible, and avoid having any property at all.

          For those men that desire property, it cannot be obtained by majority decision. As such, it must be maintained by either exchange – buying off the rentiers – or by violence – preventing the rentiers.

          AND THAT IS WHAT THE DATA SAYS.

          Men and women are doing the logical thing. What else would we expect them to do? We may be irrational moral voters, but we are certainly rational moral consumers.

          The source of property is use of violence to create the institution of property against the will of the majority. Only then is property an asset worthy of seeking by the middle and lower classes who which also to be enfranchised in the prosperity that results from the formal and informal institutions of private property.

          (It’s thankless work, you know. …. Putting violence back into polite political discourse, one sentence at a time. 😉

          Curt

          Source date (UTC): 2013-07-12 10:24:00 UTC

        • HEIDEGGER NOTES Been working on Heidegger today. And I still don’t ‘grok it’. I

          HEIDEGGER NOTES

          Been working on Heidegger today. And I still don’t ‘grok it’. I understand the underlying problem that he is trying to solve, but I don’t understand his solution.

          If you can’t describe something as human actions, and if you can’t reduce something to analogy to experience, then I question whether you understand it, and whether it’s testable. And so far I can’t find a praxeological (neutral encyclopedic) set of definitions.

          I still think it’s just another zoroastrian revival movement. An attempt to argue that our senses are enough to serve our desires. A regressive attempt to return to primitivism, so that the senses and instincts alone allow us to abandon the problem of interpreting abstractions as analogies to experience.

          FROM HEIDEGGER FOR DUMMIES:

          “The Daseinic mechanism is Heidegger’s juvenile attempt at a grammatical and semantic transcendentalist trick in order to improperly elevate existence or BEING to the ontological status of a predicate via the gerundial phrase being there.”

          “Heidegger gambled [correctly] that the average reader, not expecting to be bamboozled, would, after a while forget the real underlying meaning of the 3rd-person continuous present fragment –*being* and gradually internalise *Being* and the gerundial *being there* as legitimate names for his human everyman’s existence. *Dasein* also means *Existence* in German) so bingo, the fact that existence is unpredicable would be forgotten by most the readers of *Being and Time,* after a chapter or two and for the purposes of his occult agenda it would be accepted into the philosophical lexicon as a fully fledged noun, which is the way he boldly treats it in his writings.

          Labouring under the same misaprehension of the Russian Name Worshipping Cult which holds that that if one names something it psychologically instantiates it, he smuggled *IS* and *Being* into his nominological vocabulary in the form of the gerundial noun phrase *being there* in order to avoid the more obvious existential Cartesian-style duality that the word *Being* implies* if it is bereft of an existential modality or modification to indicate, such as: *Adolf is being silly.*etc.

          Dasein (Being-There or Existence) is presented as a verbal noun – as a pseudo-entity which, as a noun, might be expected to have an existence – but it is an illusion, for it is no more than a BE word in drag – a 3rd-person conjugation or continuous *being* word in metaphysical sheep*s clothing. It must be remembered therefore that when he uses the word Dasein, he is misapplying it to substantiate or cognitively instantiate the verb being as a noun and thus when he talks of the: *Being of Dasein* he is really saying the *Being of Being.* [compare *the dancing of dancing.*]

          Ask yourself… “Is it the dancing Annabelle that exists – or *dancing?* Is it the being called Annabelle that exists, or the *Being* of the being called Annabelle?”

          —-

          SKEPTICISM

          I called Heidegger a philosophical date-rapist for this kind of sneaky stuff… But I keep open the possibility that I simply cannot conceive of world as he tries to communicate it. On the other hand, I think it’s also a possibility that Heidegger is a christian mystic doing a very artful job of creating a philosophical excuse for tyranny.

          All I see from the Postmodernists and the Continentals is an attempt to recreate the church by irrational rather than arational means. Religion may be arational because it is allegorical, but at least protestantism is not irrational, in the sense that it’s false. The difference between allegory and the pretense of rationality is the difference between not only truth and falsehood, but truth and deception.

          Source date (UTC): 2013-07-11 10:06:00 UTC

        • NO MAN IS FIT TO RULE Plato’s Republic is his attempt to creat a society capable

          NO MAN IS FIT TO RULE

          Plato’s Republic is his attempt to creat a society capable of manufacturing a contemporary heroic general.

          But Tolkien has a different take:that none of us is fit to rule .

          “My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inaminate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people. […] Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. ”

          (Thanks to Francesco Principi.)

          Source date (UTC): 2013-07-11 06:07:00 UTC

        • The Incentives of Scientists And Philosophers: A Virtuous Competition For Status

          [E]conomic reasoning would argue that people follow incentives. The incentives of scientists are to prosecute an idea regardless of its merit. Science does not progress because scientists are self aware, or because they employ rational criticism and judgement. (Although I think this criticism applies to the 90% at the bottom more so than the 10% at the top.) Science advances because either another’s career advance is obtained by discrediting an existing idea, or because its author dies and can no longer defend it from, or adapt it to, criticism. For these reasons, requesting that scientists demonstrate “understanding” of the philosophy of science is overrated – unless incentives exist to enforce that understanding. Since it is not in a scientist’s interest to use critical rationalism, it is very hard to imagine they will. [P]hilosophers are primarily cops: critics and articulators of what we humans say and do but do not fully understand. And honestly we are rarely inventors. And we function as critics of scientists, since it is in our interests to obtain status by criticizing scientists. A scientist collects data and forms hypotheses. We collect arguments in support of hypotheses and criticize those arguments. That is our incentive: it is our specialization. Not data collection: criticism. But it is patently irrational to expect scientists alone to demontrate behaviors counter to their incentives. It’s a division of knowledge and labor in real time. And we are supposed to be the rational ones after all.

        • REASON AND FACT ARE INSUFFICIENT FOR PERSUASION: BECAUSE MYTH, MYSTICISM, AND FA

          REASON AND FACT ARE INSUFFICIENT FOR PERSUASION: BECAUSE MYTH, MYSTICISM, AND FALSEHOOD ARE MORE COMFORTABLE TRUTHS.

          (Profound)

          We can learn from history that allegorical mythology was converted to factual description by taking advantage of the desire for certainty, and inventing the scriptural religions – despite the obervable and logical contradiction of mystical statements with reality of experience.

          We can observe the continuing human desire for marxism, communism, socialism and redistributive social democracy despite its irrefutable logical impossibility, despite its universal failure, and despite our scientific knowledge of human behavior.

          We can observe that humans desire to believe the many contradictory falsehoods in Postmodern thought that form the current progressive ideology, and which is taught in our schools as the civic religion of the state.

          None if this should give us confidence that reason and fact will prevail, or that people desire reason and fact. Evidence is to the contrary.

          Progressivism, freudianism, postmodernism, and marxism are – as Hayek warned us – a new mysticism ushered in by Marx (1848) and Freud (1902AD), just as Zoroaster (~1800BC), Abraham (~1800BC), Jesus, Peter and Paul (<~50BC) ushered in ages of mysticism for political purposes.

          And we are, thanks to them, and thanks to human desires, despite our progress in the physical sciences, living in an age of regressive, pervasive, social mysticism.

          That is the evidence.

          Hayek suggested that future generations would see this as an age of mysticism. But there is little evidence of that in history. Instead, generations are perfectly happy to persist the social narrative and the scientific and economic narrative as if they were independent frames of reference for describing human history.

          Property, truth, and reason are aristocratic values and virtues, and their dominance in any culture the result of the organized application of violence by aristocrats to protect themselves from the ignorance, mysticism, and desires of the many.

          That humans benefit from aristocratic virtues and values is evidentiary. That they will voluntarily adopt aristocratic virtues and values is contrary to all evidence.

          And membership in aristocratic rationalism REQUIRES that we observe and respect that evidence.

          If you persist in the illusion that either the enlightenment vision of equality of ability limited only by will, or the postmodern vision of equality limited only by environment, then you are, in fact, non-rational, unscientific.

          Reason, property rights, and aristocratic virtues and values will exist only where a minority is willing to use violence to impose them on an unwilling population more desirous of mysticism and mental comfort than objective truth.

          Violence is the highest virtue, and the greatest asset one can possess. Everything else is just rhetorical justification to obtain property rights at a discount. And that is not aristocratic: it is fraud.

          Curt Doolittle

          Kiev

          Source date (UTC): 2013-07-10 04:53:00 UTC

        • THE INCENTIVES OF SCIENTISTS Economics would argue that people follow incentives

          THE INCENTIVES OF SCIENTISTS

          Economics would argue that people follow incentives.

          The incentives of scientists are to prosecute your idea regardless of its merit.

          Science does not progress because scientists are self aware, or because they employ rational criticism and judgement. (Although I think this criticism applies to the 80% at the bottom more so than the 20% at the top.)

          Science advances because either another’s career advance is obtained by discrediting an existing idea, or because its author dies and can no longer defend it from criticism.

          For these reasons, “understanding” is overrated unless incentives exist to enforce that understanding.

          Since it is not in anyones interest to be critically rational it is very hard to imagine they will be.

          Philosophers are primarily cops, critics and articulators of what we do but do not understand – and rarely inventors. And we function as critics of scientists, since it is in our interests to obtain status by criticizing scientists.

          But it is patently irrational to expect scientists alone to demontrate behaviors counter to their incentives.

          And we are supposed to be the rational ones after all.

          Source date (UTC): 2013-07-08 07:28:00 UTC

        • THE LONG TERM IMPACT OF DYSGENIC REPRODUCTION ON ECONOMICS AND NORMS UNDER DEMOC

          THE LONG TERM IMPACT OF DYSGENIC REPRODUCTION ON ECONOMICS AND NORMS UNDER DEMOCRACY

          (Work in progress.)

          If under manorialism, the breeding rate of the underclass is suppressed while the middle class increases, and under consumer capitalism, and redistributive socialism, the middle class suppresses its reproduction while the lower class increases its reproduction, in the aggregate we should see declines in middle class traits and increases in lower class traits.

          The social classes under consumer capitalism sort even more effectively than under agrarianism due to the flexibility of labor and movement.

          The social class distribution is highly correlated.with IQ. The beneficial distribution of british IQ for example is limited to the british middle class and there is very little rotation in and out of that class. Given that intelligence regresses toward the mean, in-class reproduction must be in place.

          While the flynn effect appears to produce a demonstrated improvement in test taking because of the universal environmental presence of scientific knowledge, it also appears that northern europeans should have been on par with askenazim only 150 years ago, but due to a return to unconstrained breeding, and highly constrained breeding in the middle and upper middle classes under consumer capitalism and social democracy, that we are in fact, in the aggregate, six or so points “dumber”. Which is approaching one half of a standard deviation in intelligence: 7.5 points. This fact correlates with the reproductive rates of the classes. Which is why Flynn has been investigating it and writing about it.

          Now the reasons that I care are:

          1) Corruption increases rapidly aggregate IQ declines. So does mysticism.

          2) It appears that it requires an IQ of about 105 to articulate ideas or repair a machine.

          3) Any norms in any society are dependent upon the distribution of ability to adopt them. Rationalism cannot exist or function as a norm if there are insufficient numbers of people capable of rationalism.

          4) Under the “Pareto rule if thumb”, 1% of people create all the marginal value and 19% propagate that idea, and that 20% controls 80% of the property and resources in the society. As such the distribution of ability of that group must stay above 105 in order to maintain the high trust society, which is the source of the western economic advantage in risk taking.

          5) it appears that the benefit of industrialization has been equilibrated – been fully utilized. It appears that vast numbers if people mist subsist on service jobs. It appears that while aggregate human intelligence was wasted on the farm and enabled by industrialization, that the 105, and perhaps 110 levels are downward limits to calculative ability, and all jobs in society of value require calculation “that which we cannot sense without measurements and formulae as a proxy”.

          6) People demonstrate that they overwhelmingly prefer to reproduce, associate and work in homogenous groups by race, class and culture – except at the margins. Further, these groups maintain their own identities, mythologies and signaling economies, such that in group status signals are discounted cost in relation to out-group status signals. And the vote that way. As competing blocks seeking status. (Rents). Furthermore the distribution if ability in these groups means that reproductive rates under consumer capitalism, social status, economic productivity, and opportunity will increase in friction.

          7) for these reasons, diversity decreases trust and increases the scope of the state under democracy. (Unlike under parliamentary nationalist monarchy. )

          In other words we aren’t insulated by our sentience from evolutionary biology. And the net result is indeed “dysgenic”, conflict inducing, and a threat to the goal of a positive egalitarian society.

          The only evidence we have suggests that small homogenous states in grat variety will allow us to produce through cultural competition what political cooperation will actually prevent.

          Source date (UTC): 2013-07-08 07:21:00 UTC

        • I’M NOT SURE MOLINARI IS RIGHT “Private property is redundant. “public property”

          I’M NOT SURE MOLINARI IS RIGHT

          “Private property is redundant. “public property” is an oxymoron. All legit property is private. If property isn’t private it’s stolen.”

          — Gustave de Molinari.

          (from the libertarian page – by Francesco Principi)

          I’m torn Francesco.

          It looks like private property is a normative ethic (“should”) that produces multiple beneficial out comes, but that as a descriptive ethic (“is”), people act as though they have property interests in all manner of ‘commons’. And they are even resistant to quantification of ownership in any commons by a process of articulating all commons’ as shares. In my work I argue that the distribution of preferences for the allocation of property between private and public commons appears to be a reflection of reproductive strategy. That reproductive strategy is able to be expressed by individuals by a combination of the decline of the family as the productive and reproductive unit, and the ability to vote for preferences in the distribution of property rights between the individual and the commons.

          Elsewhere i’m being teased about this at the moment, but the natural order of human societies appears to be matrilineal with transitory males. The ‘innovation’ that led to productivity in a division of labor, was accidental: from pastoralism which was more productive and competitive than sedentary life, and which created greater conflict over property.

          Property is an innovation, as is paternalism. Both render the world ‘calculable’ and as ‘calculable’ create the possibility of incentives to specialize in a division of knowledge and labor.

          But if women can ally with a minority of males, and vote to reverse 10,000 years of social evolution, by maintaining very limited private property rights necessary to provide survival incentives, but not the rights to the profits from the use of that property, then it appears that they will do so, in order to regain their instinctual reproductive preference.

          Control over breeding between males and females has oscillated before. Males dominated as they do in the other ape species. Alphas terrorize and rape. Humans developed language, gossip and weapons and managed to constrain and kill wayward alphas. This made sex more widely available for males, and put females back in control of reproduction.

          When domestication made it possible for males to provide constant sources of protein at the expense of having to control territory and protect their livestock, grain stores, and irrigation channels, the paternal family was an innovation that altered the reproductive relations and familial organizational structure between men and women once again.

          At present, the combination of information systems and the state apparatus – allow extraction of abstract property (money) by various means, thereby eliminating the male advantage in possessing property for the purpose of selecting a mate – at least in the ‘beta’ or bottom half of society. Humans are returning to serial monogamy, with men unable to accumulate wealth because it is extracted by the child support, alimony, and various redistribution systems.

          Property rights were granted by our european ancestors to those who fought in battle – to protect private property rights. If the meaning of that sinks in, then what we learn is this: private property is an innovation that is the preference of the minority, and it was instituted over the reproductive preferences of the majority. It produced eugenic reproduction, the division of knowledge and labor, reason and science, literature and arts.

          But the source of property is the organized application of violence by a minority against a majority who does not desire it, and should not, because it is against their reproductive and instinctual interests.

          In the west, purely by accident, the battle tactics required expensive equipment, voluntary participation, and heroic behavior. THis resulted in a shortage of men, who, as a minority, could out-fight more numerous competitors. But they constantly needed to increase their numbers, so they extended the franchise of property rights to any of those who would fight to preserve it. having earned it, those members fought to keep it.

          This system of habits and incentives created what we call egalitarian aristocracy. It is unlike political leadership elsewhere, which cold rely on subjugating large numbers of warrior slaves, such as in north africa, the middle east, and the far east.

          Property produces a virtuous cycle when combined with contract, numbers, money, and especially literacy. But it isn’t natural to man. And it’s entirely unnatural to women. And they are, world wide, expressing distaste for it wherever they can vote.

          US Presidential candidates and therefore policy are at present determined by single female voters. They vote as a consistent block: to undermine 10k years of the development of property, and 5k years of european egalitarian property rights.

          Mainstream economists see this as increasing people’s choices, and suiting the Rawlsian ethic. But the external consequences are something quite different: the destruction of the nuclear family, and everything about that social order that we have created for millennia.

          I don’t know pricelessly what will happen over the next two generations, but I suspect that, as in all of history, unmarried men, and poor and unemployed men, who are currently assuming the change in their circumstances is temporary, will produce a generation that has a different perspective, and that different perspective will lead to catastrophic change in the social order, one way or another – Proving that Strauss and Howe were right, perhaps by coincidence.

          Small things in great numbers have vast consequences.

          The source of property is violence.

          Property is unnatural to man.

          Because it is against the interest of women.

          I don’t like it. But that’s how it is.

          Source date (UTC): 2013-07-06 14:29:00 UTC